While many organizations are moving toward cloud-native applications that run in a hybrid cloud infrastructure, traditional on-premise data centers remain the norm, as ZDNet's Charles McLellan reported. TechRepublic's panel of experts agreed: When asked "Does your company still run its own data center?" all 12 members of the CIO Jury said "yes."

"We still run our own data center, but we've dramatically reduced the footprint through virtualization and other infrastructure consolidation saving quite a bit on power and cooling," said Michael Spears, CIO and chief data officer of the National Council on Compensation Insurance. "We are moving to a private/hybrid cloud model and don't anticipate eliminating the entire data center any time soon."

In 2017, spending on IT infrastructure for off-premise cloud deployments will increase by double digits, according to a recent report from the Uptime Institute. However, the majority of end user spending—nearly 60%—will still be done on on-premise IT infrastructure, including on-premise private cloud and on-premise traditional IT, the report noted. Only one in 12 companies have all of their applications in the cloud, according to a recent survey from Tech Pro Research.

"We have two facilities, but only because we have enough scale to make it cost effective still, versus the public cloud," said Dustin Bolander, CIO of Technology Pointe. "We also do a significant amount of work in [Microsoft] Azure."

At financial institutions, protecting customer data is of utmost priority, said Muhammad Azfar Latif, head of IT in the product management division at United Bank Limited. "The data governance policy by our regulator is still not clear about utilizing the cloud services," he said. "However we are analyzing to move some non-customer related services like IT service desk, project management tools, and BPM to the cloud in this year."

Certain workloads run better in your own data center, according to Cory Wilburn, CIO of the Texas General Land Office. "If your organization has already made the investment in standing up a data center, each application or workload should be considered on a case-by-case basis to determine the best fit, based on cost and performance requirements," Wilburn said. "The cloud is a great choice for many things, but not necessarily all things."

Dan Gallivan, director of IT at Payette, who was not a member of the CIO Jury, said that while his company still runs its own data center, it is pushing toward the cloud over time. "We're trying to leverage IaaS and SaaS where it makes sense for our business so that we won't have to depend on our internal data centers—given that we can't do it better than them, it's not worth us trying to keep up with the rising costs," Gallivan said. "I expect we will be in a hybrid cloud, leveraging the cloud data centers for redundancy and failover and local for performance."

N'Gai Oliveras Arroyo, IT director, Office of the Comptroller of Puerto Rico

Michael Spears, CIO and chief data officer, National Council on Compensation Insurance

Cory Wilburn, CIO, Texas General Land Office

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